The Black Butterfly
by AmicableAlien
Summary: It's something so wrong, she does not think of it and he tries to forget. But when the word comes that she is dying, he runs to her one last time. Semi-canon, Jet/Mai
1. Dying

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**The Black Butterfly**

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_  
There's just too much that time cannot erase...  
I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone...  
But you still have all of me..._

---My Immortal, Evanesence

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When he hears she is dying, he runs.

They say an old man can't run. Well, maybe that might be true for other men but not him. Not him. He's been running every day since he was two years old. No amount of years or old war wounds or what-the-hell-ever is going to stop him. Not when she is dying and he has only days before she disappears completely somewhere he can't follow.

He runs. He runs past his daughter, he runs to the edge of his farm. He runs down the path and through the road (no sentries, not any more, not since the war ended) and across the fields. He runs, an old man with a stick, until he can see the lights on the water and he knows that the city isn't far away. He runs down to docks and he runs to the nearest ship. They don't want to take him. Let's face it, who does? But he persuades them anyway, works off his passage as best he can. Tearing rope for oakum, cooking, sometimes even navigating, once they work out he can use a map better than the captain. They put up with him: the demands to go faster, the snapping and snarling and the silent watches he spends by the prow, staring out. Waiting. Waiting for what? They don't know.

He doesn't know either. All there is inside him is the fierce yearning, the hope that sometime _soon_ they'll sight land and he can see her, spread his fingers through her hair and see her small bemused smile.

They arrive on the third day. He's off the boat before they have the rope tied around the bollard on the dock. He's off and running and they don't stop him. They don't even try because they know now that to even think of it is to court Death. Instead they leave him be, the old man with his crazy wanderings and tie the boat down in time for unloading.

He doesn't wander though. Despite what they think, he isn't mad. He feels completely sane, completely normal. Unless that its self is a form of sanity. Unless loving that woman was a form of sanity.

They are reluctant to let him in at first. They baulk at his strange clothes. Eventually one calls for the superior officer. He comes. He is puzzled.

"Who are you?"

He shakes his head.

"What do you want?"

"A meeting."

"With whom?"

He says her name. They gape.

"That is impossible."

He shakes his head again. _Take me to her. She won't refuse me. _

They shrug and nod. They lead him through the corridors, up the staircase. A knock on a door. Her husband comes out. Red-rimmed eyes glare at him resentfully. It is funny how such a powerful man can still act like such a child.

"What do you want?"

"She is dying. One more time, for pity's sake."

The husband glares at him. "She chose me."

"Yes."

"Remember that." The husband steps aside. The way is clear.

He walks into her rooms his heart hammering.

Everything is as he imagined it. Clean. Sober. Neat. Just as she liked to be seen. But now and then, as he crossed the luxurious wool carpet, he catches glimpses of the girl he became infatuated with. The girl who wasn't always calm and neat and caring.

The bed dominates the room. He moves towards it, holding his breath. Praying.

She is as still as a doll on the sheets. He hair is spread over the white pillows. Her hands are hanging loose by her sides. It is strange to see them so helpless. When he knew her, they were always busy. Now they just lie there.

He kneels down. Arthritis make his joints ache. He looks like a penitent about to confess his sins. He takes her hand as if it were the benign hand of a goddess. Holding it desperately, afraid to let go.

Her eyes open. They don't flutter, they don't blink. They just open. The movement, like her, is plain and unadorned and beautiful because of it. His grip tightens.

She hacks, harshly. A handkerchief is pressed to her lips and when it comes away he can see the blood. She nods, tired, pain-filled eyes meeting his own.

"Does he know? How bad it is?"

She laughs, a harsh husky sound. "It he does, he has not heard it from me." Her eyes gobble up his face like a starving man. "You came."

"Did you think I wouldn't?"

"I didn't know." She coughs again and he would give anything for the linen to come away unspoiled. "I seem to get more ignorant as I grow older."

He remembers the meeting in Ba Sing Se. How she had threatened to kill him. How he'd kissed her and laughed. How she'd hesitated every time she raised a hand against him after that. How he'd exploited that weakness like the hot-headed fool he had been. How she clung to him later when they kissed alone and how he had wanted to cling to her but had been afraid.

"You were born wise. It seems only fair that you would die stupid." As soon as he says the word, he wants to curse. The far away look comes back into her eyes.

"I do things backwards then. It makes sense."

Nothing about her made sense. That was why he was here, begging her to stay. "Don't do it."

"Do what?"

He feels a rush of anger at her bland innocence. "Don't die on me. Don't you dare do it, woman."

"If I live I go back to my husband."

"I know that." She would always do her duty. "But if you…"

"Die."

"If you die, you go somewhere I can't reach you."

She looks at him. Her thumb strokes down the side of his hand. She says his name once. Very softly. "I am dying."

"Not you're not."

"Yes I am. I can feel it. It's like a numbness creeping into my bones." She swallows down more blood. He wants to stop her, to tell her not to do that. But she has a mind like a donkey, stubborn and contrary. "I hoped you would come. I wanted to tell you…" Coughing overtakes her again.

"It's all right."

"No, I…" She rolls over. The coughing fit is worse than the last. She spits up the blood into a basin by her head. All the time, her hand never leaves his. When she rolls back, her eyes are bright with fever. "I want you to know…"

"You…"

"I want you to know. Even when I chose him, it was always you. I always loved you."

His other hand reaches up. Strands of hair are brushed off her smooth high forehead. He says nothing but then he doesn't have to. She swallows and leans into the action. It's as soothing as a mother's hand but callused and cracked and rough and just like him that she wants to weep, she who has never cried. His lips whisper down. They brush off her forehead, whispering the words he will admit to no one else. Her name is like a drop of honey at the end.

She sighs. "I'm scared." She breathes softly. Her head feels light against to the creased and crumpled pillows. "I scared to die now the time is here."

"I will call him."

"No!" Her hand catches his. Nails dig into his skin. "Please."

"He is your husband."

"He is sensitive. He has had too much grief in his life. He would not be able to…" Her eyes speak volumes. He pinned by them, a fly struggling against the wave of the inevitable.

"Why me?" _Why did you choose me, from every other person who has loved you?_

"Because you are the only one who can give me the courage." She lies back. She looks absurdly young, her high necked nightgown more like a child's than a woman's. "I need courage."

He is not brave. He knows that. But she thinks he is, because she brings out the best in him. She brings out the pious hero, the soft-hearted carer, the gentle lover. He is none of these things but for her he will pretend.

She can tell by his stillness that he has agreed. Her husky breath eases out. Her gentle squeeze along his hand thanks him.

Stiffly, he stands up. She can hear the hitch in his breathing as the old war wound catches him on the hip. He looms over her like an ancient vengeance-carrying angel.

"Jet…"

He runs his fingers down her pale cheek. She catches the palm and kisses it.

"I love you, Mai. Always have. Always will."

Jet bends down. His lips press against the Fire Lady's, gentle at first then passionate, stealing her breathe away, giving her his. He is still kissing her as Mai's life eases out of her body and her heart stops beating.

When he comes away, he can taste her soul. And he knows she is gone.

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	2. Surfacing

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**The Black Butterfly**

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_**Forty-seven years earlier, in the Great City of Ba Sing Se...**_

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_He had been dying for three days._

_He couldn't remember much. What little he did remember was blurred and psychotic. A result of the fever, he was told later. Fever often did strange things to a man's mind, he knew that. He might not quite understand the words the doctors used: delirium, convulsions. Spasms. What in the nine hells were they? But he did understand fevers._

_His mother had died from one, after all._

_Not that that mattered._

_He woke up once throughout the fever. It was a cold-as-ice splash of reality, shaking him awake. He'd sat up, gasping. For a moment he'd thought he was still dreaming (hallucinating). After all, the prisons of the Earth King don't have green curtains, gauzy and muted, catching the cool air. It doesn't have wide spaces, clean smells or… or silence._

_Then there was sweat on his skin, sticky, clogging. Like blood, someone else's blood, when it clung to your skin after a fight and you can't get it off, can never get it off, even though you scrub and scrub and stand in the stream for hours until your feet and lower body are numb. He hated it. He hated it and the scream bubbling up in his throat was about to break free, like bile, like blood, when a cool hand had brushed across his shoulder._

_Cool. River water, sweet syrup after a long day, his mother's hand in his own…_

_He'd nearly taken the hand off. Ripped it off, torn bone from bone and flesh from flesh. He would have too if someone (who was it? He can't remember, can't even remember leaving his cell) hadn't taken his knives away along with all his clothes. He was butt-ass naked and scared to hell. The knives had been his constant companion since... since when the… since forever. What was he without them? It was like taking air from your lungs. He couldn't breathe, survive without the knives. They kept him safe. They kept him alive._

_He stared at the mute figure behind the gauze. Tiredness made his head swim. For a moment it looked like a woman – a girl. He thought he was dreaming. No, maybe he was dead. Maybe this was the divide Smells kept on talking about. The Great Divide._

_There was a scent of jasmine in the air. Honeysuckle, jasmine and something darker. Richer. He wasn't rich enough to identify it. He knew it was a rich smell though. Maybe that was what sandalwood smelled like. Like the princess in the story his mother used to tell. What was it again? In the beginning was the cowherd Altar who was in love with the daughter of the King of Heaven, Vega, who was beautiful, so beautiful the clouds would weep to see her..._

_Slowly the hand came through again. It was white, the whitest skin he had ever seen. It drifted, like a pearl in the sea of soothing green, just for a moment. Then gentle, it brushed across his skin, on __his shoulder. "You're awake."_

_The skin was cold. It sent shivers across his body. Her other hand came in. Drifted too. Like the first one. Graceful, white and long fingered. Rough palms. They pressed down on his shoulders and still he couldn't see her face._

_He struggled. He tried to stay up, stay fighting, even if he could barely move for the thrumming pain in his head and the ache in every bone. Fighting had kept him alive. It still could, if he gritted his teeth and held on long enough._

_"Relax."_

_A quiet monotone. No emotion, no attempt at impassioned pleas. But there was a line of steel around the words, a threat and he tried to grin, the same old cocky grin that had earned him more black eyes and kisses than he'd care to count._

_He recommended something not entirely proper. Her hands paused with shock. Then the shove came and he was flat on his back. The sheets were cold then, the pillows too, and he rolled into them like a child._

_The statue behind the gauze withdrew her hands. For a moment, it seemed like she was staring at them as if they had become something new and not entirely comfortable. Then they were folded. Precise and mechanical. Through the muslin he can see her tilt her chin and shake out her dark hair._

_Definitely a Vega, he thought, before oblivion and exhaustion claimed him again._

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	3. Yielding

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**The Black Butterfly**

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It takes him two hours to leave the body.

He doesn't move at first. He just stays there, kneeling by her bed, her hand clasped between the two of his. The skin grows cold slowly, from the outside in. It's as if a band of ice had gone through her flesh. Before he would have shuddered at the clammy onset of death. Now he just sits there. Waiting for Death to take him too.

When he finally realises that Death has no pity for lost lovers, he stands up. His old bones creak. He represses a groan of pain – he'd forgotten how terrible old age feels – and stretches. There is a heavy weight on his chest. He stretches again. He tries to ease it out of his bones, like it was only a shadow left behind from his illness last winter.

Then he realises it is grief and sighs.

There is nothing he can do about grief. No exercise he can try to lift the pain. No indulgence he can steal to bury the sense of loss. He is an old man now. He has dealt with grief before and he knows this.

The husband is outside still when he leaves her room. He's glaring out the window, his spine straight. Is that a thing with the Fire Nation, Jet wonders? She had had it too. That stiffness, like they were born to be soldiers.

Or maybe it's because the Fire Lord just has a poker shoved up his arse.

Either way, he's a self-righteous son of a…

He checks the thought. After all, the Fire Lord had left them be. Even after the two hour mark had passed, Zuko had left them alone. It was, he supposes, an honourable, decent thing. A noble thing.

He knows he would never have the guts to do it. Or the stupidity.

The Fire Lord doesn't look back. "You realise this visit is highly irregular."

Good old Fire Lord. Always one for the proper rules and regulations. It seems he caught the bureaucracy bug sometime during his reign. There's little left now of the teenager who stole chickens from the Captain's kitchen on the way to Ba Sing Se.

"Did she ask for me?"

"You would not have been given entrance if she hadn't." The words are bitter. "I trust you will leave now?"

_No._

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not."

Fire Lord stiffens. The red silk crackles. "You are not wanted here."

_Since when have I ever been wanted?_ Jet rolls his shoulders. Grey, shaggy hair brushes the dirty brown cotton. He says nothing.

The silence seems to goad the Fire Lord. He lifts his chin. The golden comb sparkles as noon sunshine catches it. "She loved me."

Jet tenses.

"She told me she did. On our wedding night. And every night after that."

_She's always been a good liar. _

He bites back on the retort he wants to make. It's cruel and petty. It would wipe the smirk off the pale face so fast the Fire Lord wouldn't have time to blink.

The golden eyes swing around to meet his. "She chose me."

She did. He can remember the hour, the very day that she turned to him, her yellow-gold eyes as cold as stone and told him she would marry another man. He remembers how she broke down then, the walls falling away brick by brick and told him how she was sorry, so sorry but she had to, she had to...

"She chose me." The Fire Lord repeats, lifting his chin. Challenging. "I made her happy."

Jet bows his head.

"I know."

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	4. Pacing

**The Black Butterfly**

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_She hadn't come back._

_Oh, there were plenty of other nurses there. Katara-like nurses with kind smiles and gentle eyes. The type of girls he'd always liked because, well, they appealed to his ego. He was not so hypocritical as to deny that. They would look at him like he was a big hero and he'd milk it for every second he could get._

_Most times he had got a kiss or more out of them while he was at it but that was just good manners. Had to show some appreciation for these sweet girls._

_No kisses this time though. He hadn't a clue why. Sure, he was weak as a kitten but that only gilded his helpless wounded soldier appeal. Besides, he'd learnt from the age of five that women were, one and all, suckers for invalids. By any rights he should have at least gotten to know one._

_But instead of blushing, they only backed away when he smiled piteously at them. Sometimes, he caught a hint of a return smile but then it was like a bucket of cold water had been thrown over them. They backed away and that was that. Soft, gentle nurses became terrified mice._

_Goddamn it._

_He healed slowly. It must have taken two weeks until he was ready to stand on his own two feet. By the time he was ready to stand again, his body felt otherworldly. Like it wasn't even his. His hands felt too big, his feet too clumsy. Even when he shook his head out and gripped onto linen bed clothes (fingers trembling and watery-cold) he didn't feel right. He didn't feel _Jet_._

_It took him another week to reach the window. By that time, he realised the whole world didn't feel right._

_For first things first, the world wasn't made of green marble._

_Not his world anyway. His world was the forests and rivers, the waterfalls ringed by slippery rock-and-moss. His world was parched yellow roads, smelly brigs in leaky ships and cold bone-dampening night breezes on deck._

And maybe, just maybe a dark room with that light, that one green light, now soothing, now blinding, the low monotone like a rumble from a hungry wolf-bear and that smell, oh gods the smell of fear and rotting light…

_He shook himself and rubbed the back of his neck. His hand was normal now. It rough-rubbed away the sickly tickle. The feeling of a spider's feathery legs brushing against his skin._

_Well, yeah. The world. Back to that._

_This, sure as hell burns and the moon drowns, wasn't his world. This world had marble columns. And gauze. Gauze everywhere. Curtains, bed clothes, women's clothes (he grinned at that), men's clothes (mental shudder). And servants._

_Christ he nearly was a servant once. Now he had an army of them at his beck and call._

_How was the unsettling question he chose not to ask himself._

_Although, judging from this lot, he didn't think he'd want servants. Not when they won't bring him what he wants. And it wasn't as if it was a big deal neither._

_Just a glance. Just a little visit from Vega. Not such a big request from a man who was still only tottering back from the grave._

_He asked them. Oh, he asked plenty of times. Described her, he hair, her silence, her white, white hands. Even, gods help him, the smell, the heavy sweet smell that filled your nose, mouth and lungs with spiced honey and a hint of danger. He'd felt a fool when he did it. But gods, he just_ needed_ her._

_No dice._

_He called them several creative names after that. Invented a few creative punishments too which had the maids listening wide-eyed and shocked (Could you _do_ that with a hook-sword?). Described them in horrific detail and then broke three bowls of the bland mush they'd been stuffing him with._

_No dice._

_Oh, he'd had a relapse after that. He'd slid to the floor, blacked out and found himself awake again in that bed, two days missing from his life. Still. No dice._

_No Vega._

_He'd taken to prowling throughout the day. Up and down. Up and down. He'd counted the blocks that made up the length of his room tow hundred times. He'd counted the blocks across one hundred times. He'd measured the room by paces, by saunters, once by toe-to-heel feet. He'd found the area after torturously dragging up the arithmetic that had been beaten into him by the village teacher. Length by breadth. Day by day. Twenty paces by thirty._

_Hell, it was something to do. Besides, it knocked him out whenever his head hit the pillows. Otherwise, he knew he'd be awake all night, staring at the gauze-hung ceiling. Thinking about Smellerbee and Longshot. About green lights and Lee and_ there's-no-war-in-Ba-Sing-Se_…_

_No. There was no war._

_But there were red uniforms crawling over the green corridors like spilled and rusting blood. Fire Nation._

_Not that many, he had to admit. But enough. Enough for suspicion to filter through his mind. Enough for him to demand answers from the maids. Coaxing at first. Flippant. Then snapping. Snarling. Afraid. Their silence spoke volumes._

_He noticed they fed him more opium after that._

_He spent his nights and most of his afternoons in a hazy stupor, not quite sleeping, not quite awake. More on the precipice and all the more draining because of that. As he grew tireder, the dreams grew worse._

There's-no-war-no-Ba-Sing-Se. Fires on his skin. Screams. Mother. The moan of a burning roof. There's-no-war-in-Ba-Sing-Se.

_And that girl._

_It took a great effort not to make the sign against evil when he thought of her. And he did. Constantly. If Vega was his quietness, this girl was the dead silence of death. Both haunted him, one after the other._

_He'd first seen her on a night when he should have been asleep. Except that night, he'd thrown away the opium. Just tipped it, oh so casual, onto the sheets beside him. The maid had been too flustered to notice. Lucky him. So that night, he was awake. Staring at the ceiling of course, with the tell tale thirst of a sober addict scratching his throat but clear. He could see and think. That was worth enough, he thought._

_Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid._

_A creak at the door at the peak of the moon had told him someone was coming. That door always creaked. The hinges needed oil but he never said anything. He preferred the early warning. Safer._

_Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid._

_He'd turned his head on the pillows. The wet silk clung to his skin, along his waist, his hip. The night air had chilled it to a sticky dampness. The gauze had been pulled back on both sides of his bed, letting in the moon, the cool bleak moon. Spilling light on the corridor. The open door. The girl._

_When he shivered, it had nothing to do with the cold._

_Even in the gloom, he could see her eyes. They rested on him almost thoughtfully, a hard yellow, a mad yellow, he thought later. But not a comfortable madness. He'd seen that and plenty in the long walk to Ba Sing Se. Old soldiers, tortured by the Fire Nation until they could talk no more then dumped on the side of the road to no where in particular. They wandered around, starving by inches, their green eyes unfocussed and lost. That madness he understood. It dug at him. It made him want to kill the first Fire National he laid his hands on. But it was_ understandable_._

_He didn't understand the look in that girl's sulphur coloured eyes. It was madness, he was sure. That intensity could never be found in a sane person. But it was too controlled, too focussed. It was madness with a purpose and more dangerous than a hissing cobra._

_Under other circumstances, he would have smiled. Maybe even passed a comment. If it had been a maid. Or another invitation. If it had been Vega._

_Now, he just met gaze for gaze, a ragged wreck of a wolf mesmerized by the perfect catlike girl ._

_She smiled. A perfect smile, showing just the right amount of teeth._

_Jet didn't sleep for the rest of that night._

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